Does anyone else feel this strange
music?

The universe is fond of odd pairings. Electrons
appreciate protons. Flowers like bugs. Forests need fire. How else can
we explain the partnership—and the love—between the rebellious Gen-X
spoken word artist Drew Dellinger and the erudite cultural historian
Thomas Berry, three times his age?

i was born in the eye of a storm, Dellinger writes.

It
was 1969, in the piedmont country of North Carolina. The struggle for
civil rights had been felt across the entire country but particularly
the South. Schools in North Carolina finally began to integrate in
1966, but the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., just two years
later left the region confused, discouraged, and numb. So when the
Dellingers' new baby was born, they named him Andrew King
Dellinger—Drew for short.

that balcony in Memphisin my eyesgunshot in my ears

As
one of two white children in his kindergarten class, Dellinger was
designated a “pace child.” But if his teachers expected him to set the
pace because he was a white boy, they were disappointed. Dellinger was
a restless child, constantly in motion. He hated sitting in rows,
couldn't stay in his seat, refused to do his schoolwork.

Instead, as he grew, he haunted the library with his friend, Steve Snider, hunting through the rows of dusty books for answers.

i want to know the laws of earth and objectslike patterns of migrationlike the boiling point of waterlike the law that holds the moonso gently

They
discovered some of the answers they were looking for in physics,
astronomy, world religions. They pored over the writings of Martin
Luther King, Jr., about somebodiness, about the Beloved Community,
about his opposition to the war in Vietnam. They discovered Carlos
Castaneda. (“Hey, is this really nonfiction?”) They struggled to
understand the ideas of the radical feminists—Andrea Dworkin and
Catharine MacKinnon (“Whaddya mean, they don't like Playboy?”). Along
with millions of others, they sat in darkened family rooms watching
Roots and Eyes on the Prize, awakening to issues of race and justice.

let's goto death rowlet's close every jail in the nation, free awhole generationplus Mumia.I'm not joking,we'll end in Oaklandwith somesit-ins on the dock of the baylike the Doc, MLKwatching the apartheid roll away.

Nevertheless,
Dellinger and his friend sensed that what they'd glimpsed was only a
small part of the big picture. By the time they headed off to Prescott
College in Arizona in 1990, they were searching for a larger vision, a
vision that integrated physics and astronomy and justice and ecology.

Then
one day (“Oh my God! This is it!”) they found Thomas Berry's book, The
Dream of the Earth. It was qualitatively different from anything they'd
ever read, Dellinger says. “Thomas Berry was talking about the
comprehensive story of the universe as a context for education, for
economics, for thinking about the universe as a whole, about the role
of the human in the universe. We said, ‘We gotta figure out how to meet
this guy!'”

When they learned that Berry was
scheduled to speak at the Earth and Spirit conference in October of
1990, they immediately bought tickets for Seattle.

Berry spoke for a half hour.

“I
don't think I knew how old he was,” Dellinger says with a laugh. “He
was the oldest person I'd ever hung out with. He was lovable and deep
and sagacious and wise and humble and so learned.” So Dellinger and
Snider approached Berry after the talk and invited him to come to
Arizona and lecture at Prescott College. Berry agreed to come.

Teaching the new cosmologyNewly
energized, Dellinger and Snider decided to invent and teach a class at
Prescott called New Cosmology: The Universe Story, even though they
were still freshmen themselves. They put together a syllabus and a
reading list that included books by Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and
Matthew Fox. (The class, one of the first in the country on this topic,
became a fixture in the Prescott catalog.) They formed a rap band
called Sweet Acidophilus. And they designed a magnificent prelude to
Berry's guest lecture—an hour-long multi-projector presentation of
music and stars and nebulae and galaxies. A love song to the universe.

“Tonight,” Thomas Berry said when he stepped to the podium, “is a night of cosmological significance.”

does anyone else feel this strange music?

A woman sitting near Dellinger began to cry.

Berry
explained that the triumph of industrialization is so complete that it
has destroyed itself. It has collapsed. It's over. Now, he said, we
must build a new relationship with the land, a new relationship with
life, a new relationship with the stars. We need a new story of who we
are and where we are—a story told not by scientists alone, but by
artists. We need to know that our destiny is not the accumulation of
money; it is the expansion of soul.

everything is singing a storyThe
next summer Dellinger and Snider traveled to Assisi, Italy, to study
with the great teacher for the first time. They were not disappointed.
Thomas Berry lectured from dawn until dusk for nine days straight,
following trains of thought that wove through millennia and swept all
the different religious and cultural traditions into his vision.

In
all these cultures, he explained, humans find meaning in the same way:
by integrating human processes into the cosmological processes. In
ancient China, for example, the Emperor's palace had both a winter and
a summer quarters, so the Emperor had to move from one part of the
palace to the other based on the season. And anyone who played winter
music in the summer or vice versa risked throwing off the whole
cosmological order.

Each day Dellinger and his
friend wrote pages and pages of notes until their hands ached. Then
when it grew dark, they sat around the table together, students and
teacher, eating pasta and drinking wine, laughing and talking.
Dellinger was learning more than he ever had. And he and Thomas Berry
were becoming friends.

I think, maybe thiscould be a blisslike when Dante met Beatrice.

Love lettersSince
then, Dellinger's star has risen. He has won awards, performed
cosmology rap and spoken-word poetry at more than 200 locations across
the United States, and sold more than 2,000 copies of his CD with the
song “Universe Jam,” and 1,000 copies of his new poetry book, love letter to the milky way. He's writing his dissertation about the similarity between Thomas Berry's ideas and those of Martin Luther King, Jr.

And
he has remained friends with Berry. “I owe so much to his vision. I try
to use my energy and my creativity in the service of the larger issues
that affect all of us—the extinction crisis, the issues of white
supremacy and the legacies of slavery and genocide that we're still
dealing with as a nation.”

But Thomas Berry's powerful spirit may be fading.“I'm
almost 90,” he says. “My memory fails me. What we need now is people
like Drew, people who have the understanding of the scientific
interpretation in back of industrialization but who see where we need
to make a completely new approach.”

Berry thinks
about his legacy, the world he'd like to bequeath to the creatures who
swim beneath the waves, who thrive in the soils, who grow in the
meadows and forests—and the human creatures, too.

“My hope is largely with the artists and the essayists,” he says. “The arts are our healing. Our salvation. Our hope.”

I've had limitlesslifetimes.I've had limitless lifetimes to write rhymesand get my game tight,then waited to be incarnated‘til they invented this mic....and lifetwists and fades likesmoke in the stage lights...

Carol Estes is a YES! contributing editor and co-founder of Estes Media, a film production company.

To contact Dellinger or find out about love letter to the milky way: a book of poems: email drew@poetsforglobaljustice.org.